Tag Archives: Alcoholism

Maybe the most life-saving aspect of AA and all the 12-step programs it has spawned is that we get to pick our own higher power. We don’t have to consider anyone else’s views of an HP — certainly not religion’s — as we generate an idea of the source in which we’ll place our trust.

I like to think of our conceptions of god as a sort of placeholder – something to represent the “you” we turn to – because it can be easier to reach out to “somebody” if we have some sense of who/what that is.

Reaching out to that power is the core of recovery as I know it. If you’re dying from addiction, slowly or quickly, it is the solution. The biggest stumbling block for most newcomers is that our culture still associates “God” with organized religion’s construct of a judgmental deity.

Prior to organized religion, human tribes had for many millennia held a sense of god(dess) that was multifaceted and unified with nature. But in the shadow of the agrarian revolution, as societal power became increasingly stratified, monotheism arose. In the case of the Judeo-Christian tradition, this “God” — the grouchy, punishing Dude in the Bible — became a political tool for those in power to cow the subjugated masses into compliance.

Modern goddess image

“Overseer’s Rod,” from Queen Mary’s Psalter, 1320

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Then, between 1600 and 1945, the Scientific Revolution gradually caused religion to crumble and fall — which was actually a good thing. But, tragically, we have thrown out the baby with the bath water, god with religion, and the result is the spiritual turmoil now raging throughout the world.

We stand at an extremely perilous in-between era of human history, where billions who have turned away from the rubble of religion suffer anxiety and depression, and billions who still cling to its distorted structures justify judgment, exclusion, and cruelty via its tenets.

Humanity needs a new god — one indivisible from Gaia, the complex life system of which we are a part. It is my belief that the evidence brought back consistently by Near Death Experiencers (NDEers) can offer humanity an evidence-based foundation for such a god.

I’ve decided to risk offering a series of posts on my own ideas of god, based on my NDE, the many NDE narratives I’ve heard at IANDS meetings over the past five years, and NDE narratives I have read. If any of these ideas resonate with your ideas of god, take them. If not, leave them.

Have you ever created a personal altar? It’s just a sort of sacred place in your home where photos of loved ones or meaningful objects remind you of what matters. It’s in a similar spirit that we can each assemble our concept of god(dess) – as a collection of ideas that call to us personally. My aim here is just to offer some little crystals or shells you might add to yours.

Two excellent books on Near Death Experiences are Jeffrey Long’s Evidence of the Afterlife (2010) and God and the Afterlife (2017). Both are based on thousands of NDEer’s responses to a survey accessible on the Near Death Research Foundation website. Responses come from all over the world, and the average time elapsed between the NDE event and filling out the survey is 20 years. (Strangely, NDE memories do not fade with time.)

The upshot of Long’s research is that God loves us with a Love more powerful than words can describe. Here are some excerpts:

“I knew that the being I met was comprised of a substance I can only call ‘love,’ and that substance was a force or power, like electricity. Love is the only word I have, but it’s not the right word here” (God, p.53).

“I became aware of a presence vast and unimaginable, everywhere and everything, the beginning and the end, and he was Love. I came to know that Love is a power to rival all powers — real and perceived — in the universe. (God, p. 174).

“All That Is can be perceived simultaneously as a force and as a consciousness that exists within each individual consciousness and yet is separate from each consciousness or being. It might be called God, but the ideas of gods that we have are a pale and incomplete shadow of the All That Is that I perceived” (God, p. 175)

Further, many NDEers learn that we are here on this earthly adventure as part of the expanding evolution of Love – though sadly we “forget” what we came here to do. The challenge of life on earth is to balance the self-preservation instincts we need to keep us housed in our bodies (fear/ego) with our mission of furthering Love by overcoming separation from other sentient beings (who only seem to be “other”).

“I was told that the earth is like a big school, a place where you can apply spiritual lessons you have learned and test yourself to see if you can ‘live’ what you already know you should do” (p. 101).

Many survey respondents (but not I 😦 ) were shown life reviews. These incredibly detailed yet compressed replays of their life’s events are witnessed by about 22% of NDEers (who in turn comprise about 15% of those who die and come back).

Almost exclusively, these replays focus on acts of kindness and cruelty, along with their effects rippling outward throughout the world. Most watch them together with a loving spirit who urges learning but not self-rebuke. Here’s an excerpt:

“I was in the eighth grade, and me and my friends were verbally abusing another one of our friends. It was cruel behavior, and I was drenched in cruelty. … I experienced the humiliation and pain of the girl we were tormenting. I didn’t just see her, I got to be her as she huddled next to the lockers, crying alone… My mind and heart were crying out, ‘I’m so sorry! I’m so, so sorry!’ … I felt a presence with me [that]… expressed amusement over my despair and said, with heart and mind, something to the effect of ‘You were just a kid. How bad could you have been?’ Then I was embraced by layer upon layer of compassion” (p.100).

Even when we fuck up, we are loved. No one expects us to ace this.

In short, god is the energy of Love that created and sustains all that is. Addiction cuts us off from god as we bombard our brains with meaningless dopamine, sabotaging our mission. But when we sincerely ask god for help, we open a channel that allows it to enter us, guiding and strengthening our hearts, healing us from the isolation of addiction.

It does so by slowly teaching us to love others as it loves — unconditionally. That is the not only the purpose of life, but the cure for all that ails us.

If you’re an alcoholic who can find a way to permanently quit drinking outside AA, that’s awesome. Go for it! As they say in the Big Book, “If anyone who is showing inability to control his drinking can do the right-about-face and drink like a gentleman, our hats are off to him” (p. 31).

AA is for is the person who can’t, who’s tried and failed, then tried and failed some more… and frickin’ can’t stand herself anymore. Here are a few of the ways I, personally, tried. At various times in my drinking career, with all my power of will, I swore the following:

to simply drink less

to not drink on certain days of the week

to get more exercise, eat a healthier diet, and quit poisoning myself

to meditate my stress away instead of drinking

to practice affirmations for confidence instead of drinking

to stop drinking alone

to drink just wine

to drink just beer

to have no more than one drink with lunch and three in the evening

to prove to some asshole that I’m not an alcoholic, so fuck off

to quit for a week starting tomorrow

to quit two weeks except maybe next weekend

to drink slower so I’d get less bombed

None of them worked. None. Know why? Because I’m an alcoholic. That means my brain is, by definition, BROKEN when it comes to controlling my intake of alcohol — or weed or cocaine or any mind-altering substance. I default to having just a bit. Once I start, my mind has only one setting:

And… I cannot fix my broken brain with my broken brain. If I could, it wouldn’t be broken. I’d just tone my drinking the frick down and get on with life — right? I would not be an alcoholic. I would not need AA or the steps or a higher power.

But here’s the thing, guys. We’re kind of pucked. We’re trying to mentally control a problem over which we have no control.Half Measures = Half Assed
Some of us go to AA because we get it: we’re pucked, and we’ll do everything we’re told — go to any length — to get our lives back. We take Step 1, admitting we are powerless over alcohol and cannot manage our lives.

Others of us, however, go to AA as one more item on that fucking worthless shit list above. We just add

go to some AA meetings

to our personal “I’m not gonna drink” management scheme.

Doing so is what we call a half-measure, meaning that I still believe I wield control. I’m using AA as an aid or support group, but ultimately, my ego maintains I’m taking control of my desire to drink. That idea is utterly worthless. AA meetings will do no more for a half-measure drunk than getting a “Sober Forever” tattoo, because, inevitably, we still have that broken brain.

Just ask anyone who repeatedly relapses. It may sound harsh, but in my experience, except in rare cases complicated by “grave mental disorders,” a vast majority of those who fall back into drinking have not gone at the program from their inmost heart. Relapse happens when our egos tell us, “I don’t really need to X anymore [insert go to meetings, write inventory, work with a sponsor, etc.] I’ve got this.”

Going to Any Length
A few weeks ago I was at an early morning meeting sitting near a newcomer. The meeting’s chair had used a random Big Book quote picker to cite the passage, “Your job now is to be of maximum helpfulness to others…”

“That bothers me,” the newcomer shared. “I’ve got six months and I feel like I’m struggling. I can’t be of maximum helpfulness to anyone! How’m I supposed to devote my life to — I mean, I can barely take care of myself right now!”

At the break for 7th Tradition, I scooted over to him and said, “Who defines ‘maximum’? All it means is, the maximum you can do today to be supportive to someone else. You’re here. You shared honestly. Maybe that’s your max today. The point is that you’re trying your best.”

Trying Your Hardest = Giving Up Control
This may sound like a contradiction, but it’s only when we really give up control that we become willing to try our hardest at spiritual growth, and vice versa. When, after 14 years of trying my hardest to drink less, I realized I was going to die drunk, and after 34 years of trying to make other people like me, I realized I hated myself, I walked into an AA meeting and finally let go.

It didn’t happen all at once. The first letting-go was just going to meetings. The next was actually praying to… something. Next was getting a kick-butt sponsor, then doing everything she told me whether I felt like it or not. “You’re going to lead an AA meeting in the women’s prison work-release house,” she told me. Did I want to do that? Hell no!! The women seemed huge and thuggish and scary to me! When they hugged me, I nearly suffocated! But I showed up each week regardless.

I’d given up calling the shots. I wanted to change, to have what I saw in Karen, my sponsor. So I did exactly what she told me. I wrote my inventory, acknowledged my defects. I made my amends. I sponsored.

Last week, my current sponsor, who has 32 years sober, asked me, who have 22 years sober, if I’d drive out with her to Bellevue and (wo)man an AA booth at the National Tribal Health Conference. This was a big deal, she explained — the first time the Indian Health Board has ever invited AA to attend, though nearly 12% of Native Americans die of alcholism.

Did I feel like driving out there this afternoon and “working” after work? Hell no. Did I do it? Hell yes. I don’t ask questions or weigh the pros and cons relative to my sobriety. I just GO.

The result? I’m in no way special or virtuous; I’m just happily sober… one more day.

I’m a alcoholic who lives in Seattle, surrounded by the beautiful forested mountains that heal me on long hikes — which are currently going up in flames as never before.

What’s the big deal? The graph to the right shows the nationwide trend of bigger, more numerous forest fires (in spite of more volunteers and better firefighting equipment). This year, 2017, scores of wildfires consuming record acreage under “extreme” conditions of prolonged drought and heat have caused all northwestern states to declare emergencies, as has British Columbia.

These super-fires incinerating our waning wildlife habitats are not part of the natural cycle: rather, they’re symptoms of climate change. For many people, the loss may seem nothing major. But for me, it’s personal. These forests are my church. Wild creatures are my saints.

So when it “snowed” ash in Seattle this past Tuesday, our sickly yellow skies blanketing everything from Seattle to Portland with flakes of what had recently been verdant, living trees, I felt as though the bodies of dead loved ones were raining down as an omen: if we continue on as we’re going, our planet will die.

Witnessing this phenomenon, unprecedented in my 57 years of living here, has ravaged my serenity. Also on my mind are the two record-breaking hurricanes striking from the south, which the US president, who does not “believe in” climate change, has eloquently described as follows: “It looks like it could be something that will be not good. Believe me, not good.” More imminently, this incompetent megalomaniac controls the US nuclear arsenal while a godfather-like thug controls Russia’s — and a madman in North Korea has just announced that he, too, has a nuclear bomb.

What do you do?! How do you live?! I’ll tell you what not to do: what I’ve been doing. I’ve been actively willing the world to change. Haven’t you felt all the mental and emotional effort I’ve been pouring out, day after day, compelling everyone to see what I see and think what I think~? Hasn’t Trump’s brain been affected by my constant mental criticism?

Nope. Not a bit. The only person impacted by my anguish… is me. I’ve been carrying the world’s woes in my tightened throat, upset stomach, and continuous low-grade headache. Today I, like so many Al-Anons, am sickening myself with fear and worry much as I once nearly killed myself with drugs and alcohol — believing again and again that I’ll somehow move closer to what I want using something I know does not work.

I fall again and again for the notion that I can control the world around me. I forget I’m powerless over people, places, and things. But my inner addict never forgets the care-banishing, fukitol power of a drink or a drug. “There’s an easy way,” it lobbies from the back of my mind, “to quit giving a shit about anything or anyone.”

What else can I do? You guys have taught me, I always have access to three super-powers: a) meditation & prayer, b) program, and c) action. I know, I know — they don’t sound real impressive, but they’re transformative, redirecting my path from a destructive to a constructive direction.

a) Meditation and prayer are, strangely enough, the antithesis of worry. Sitting with eyes closed, I simply quiet my mind as I get to know the inner space of my consciousness. It’s a lot like entering a dark room and waiting until your eyes adjust. I can note how urgently or lackadaisically my thoughts enter; I can note my reactions to them, de-escalating from “Holy shit! I just remembered this ultra-important thing!!” to “Yup… that’s us thinking again…”

At this point, I can begin to sense the inherent foolishness of my normal state of consciousness. I don’t blame myself for being foolish — I am, after all, just a person with squishy stuff in their skull. I can see that I’m comically focused on my own world of thoughts, my own little “plans and designs.” Why? Because I’m scared shitless! I note the many ways I imagine I’m protecting what I love — my worries. For a few moments, I drop them all. I open to god instead and say, “This world is yours, not mine. But I’m scared shitless. Help me.”

NOW comes the point at which I can pray unselfishly, asking god to guide me to be useful beyond myself, and even to guide humanity to live on this planet less destructively. Prayer, like mass meditation, does have an effect.

b) Program means that I go to extra meetings, talk with my sponsor or sponsees, and seek out ways to be useful to others. (Going to my homegroup tonight, I get to do all three!) I can also write this blog to help you or maybe remind you to help others.

For instance, I was recently perusing this excellent book on not drinking which I’d forgotten I owned. It’s kick-ass for folks in early sobriety. I’m just gonna pass along the TOC here so you can recommend to newcomers either exploring one of these tactics (click to expand) or buying the whole damn book.

c) Action requires that when I say the Serenity Prayer, I be ready to actually changethe things I can. I realized yesterday that, while my work used to require driving all over town to meet clients, now so many of them work at Amazon that on certain days I just drive downtown and back. Guess what. I live on a bus line. Rather than heroically taking out a huge loan to buy an electric car, I can simply get my lazy, germaphobic ass on the bus on those days to reduce my goddam carbon footprint. (I promise to post a photo of me on the fucking bus below.)

9/7/17: Record-breaking hurricanes to the south; record-breaking heat and drought to the west. This isn’t the Olympics, guys. This is our planet.

I must do what I can… or I’m a hypocrite.

And yes, I’ve already called my congresswomen to express my views, but I can also plant trees, attend protests, and campaign next time around for wiser a president.

When I took Step 3 all those years ago, I made a decision to live a good life, to seek good/god in all things, and to act on its guidance. Today that means I don’t get to wallow in worry and panic any more than I do in self-pityand resentment.

There’s always a better way. Seek and we’ll find it.

PS: As promised, a few pictures of me riding the bus to work, which I now do 3 x per week, rain or shine. A tank of gas lasts me more than twice what it used to.

I recently read an article in The Guardian, a British publication, that broke my heart. It was written by an alcoholic woman who quit drinking 15 years ago but who has completely misunderstood AA as an ineffectual “self help” group.

She rightly explains,

Alcoholism is a strange condition. If you survive the drinking stage, and many don’t, it has relatively little to do with alcohol, which is merely the drug with which the alcoholic treats herself. It is, rather, a way of thinking, and continues long after you have stopped drinking. It is a voice in the head: a malevolent voice that wants you to die.

Much of the article describes with startling honesty the havoc this voice has wreaked in Tanya’s life — causing her to hide for years in workaholism and lie her way to extra morphine in the maternity ward to up her high (which I would call a relapse). Life, for Tanya, is miserable.

Almost none of the article offers a solution. She maintains,

[F]or the alcoholic there is nothing as prosaic as “better”. There is only a daily remission, based on how you deal with the voice in your head. (“Hello, monster. Where have you been?”)

…If I am unwary, she can plunge me into the deepest despair, and I have learned to construct an obstacle course to thwart her. It is made only of ordinary human love. Nothing else works.

What a tragedy that this woman has suffered for 15 fricking years with virtually no solution!

I wish I could tell Tanya: The path to freedom is encrypted in those 12 prosaic steps posted in your erroneously termed “self-help” group. Clearly you did not grasp the meaning of the first one: We cannot help ourselves.

You’re living proof of that. If you were to let quality people from AA into your life, you would learn from them that this “voice” your article discusses at length is a commonplace phenomenon we (not “they”) refer to as self-loathing, less-than, not enoughness, or simply the shadow side of a big, fat ego. Recovery defeats it.

If you could truly listen with an open mind in meetings and work the 12 steps diligently with a sponsor, you could heal more in a year than you could in decades of therapy or a lifetime of introspection — literally. Pride is all that blocks you.

I was much like Tanya when I first came to AA 22 years ago. I abhorred groupthink and its cousin oversimplification, and to me the 12 Steps, with their repeated references to “God” as a “He,” smacked of both. Their God, I assumed, had to be the same God as in the Bible, Torah, Quran or whatever. The words “as we understood Him” did little to mitigate that.

I was lucky, though. In early sobriety, I became so miserable without alcohol that living sober became utter torture: I hated being Louisa.

In those days, when I wasn’t working my meaningless data entry job, I found it impossible to get out of bed, at worst, or out of my sweatpants, at best. So annoyed was I by my happy alcoholic housemate’s assertion that my heart was suffering from a “god-shaped hole” that I went back to AA meetings and got a kick-butt sponsor just to spite him.

That sponsor impressed on me the crucial importance of seeking god, and seeking god changed everything. In my case (which, as my addiction memoir attests, was a weird one), god kept popping into my life via a series of paranormal experiences until I finally surrendered to the truth I live by today: god is real, everywhere, always.

My god is the god of nature and biology; the god of life energy; the god of love. It’s a goodness beyond our wildest imaginings, one that can upstage our ego’s grandiosity as well as self-hate. God can empower us to love others and life itself so intensely that just being is an overwhelming privilege. As my sponsor Nora says, “I feel more joy today just walking half a block to drop a letter in the mailbox than I did before in all my fanciest vacations put together.”

For me, this love of life’s poignant richness that drowns out my inner demon’s insults can be accessed only through god-aware eyes. To maintain that vision, I have be up front with god constantly: I need to live by the highest ethics I can muster, eschew lying, and follow the Golden Rule.

In good times, I must offer goodwill as if I had an infinite basket of it (cause I do). In hard times, I must never succumb to the illusion that my struggles are unique. AA meetings make both possible.

Mount Adams & wildflowers – last week

I’m just back from hiking 115 stunningly gorgeous miles along the Pacific Crest Trail with my sober friend, Sally. A little YouTube video I made of our trip is linked below.

God made this experience possible. First of all, without god buoying my heart, I’d never have found the gumption to take off into Washington’s very wild backcountry with my friend. Twice, on the trail, I had to draw on courage to accomplish more than I believed I could — once to cross a raging creek on a bunch of flimsy logs and once to get out of my tent during a midnight lightning storm at 6,5oo’ amid ruthless wind and sleet because my tent’s rainfly was getting torn off and all my stuff soaked.

In both cases, I witnessed my fright being eclipsed by a “you can do this” beam of certainty that is the antithesis of alcoholic self-loathing. It’s not ego, either. It doesn’t come from me. It’s about stepping out of the way to become a channel — letting faith power my steps and efforts.

Tanya, I wish I could gift that to you — what god, through my fellow alcoholics, has gifted me. There’s incremental suicide; then survival; then relief; and finally rejoicing — meaning you figure out what you love doing, and you freaking do it.

But the journey from one to the next is an inside job — and only for those who actively seek.

Music by http://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music

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“It Gets Better”

I tried so hard all the while I was drinking. I wanted to live a good life, to do well, to impress others. I tried my damnedest to figure out what that project called for and to make it happen. The Big Book calls this effort “self-propulsion,” the attempt to arrange people and circumstances so that we’ll get what we want.

I failed. That beautiful life I yearned for stayed just out of reach. I got good grades, looked pretty, earned degrees, attracted partners, clinched jobs and bought stuff — a car, my dream home. To bring about temporary relief, I drank every kind of booze I could find, smoked weed, took pills, snorted coke — but still wound up longing to die, to give up.

I identified as atheist — even though I’d had a Near Death Experience (NDE) at 22 during which I’d encountered god. That’s pretty rare — an atheist who’s journeyed to the light. But as I approached hitting bottom, as I threw life away ever more recklessly during those last months of drinking, god stepped in again and slapped me upside the head.

God shows up in virtually every NDE as a brilliant white light that radiates an intensity of love beyond earthly imagining. But that doesn’t mean god’s a milquetoast! There’s a point to our being here — we’ve agreed to do something by signing up for life, for this embodiment in matter. And in cases where we’re way off course, god will sometimes give us a nudge.

I’d driven home insanely drunk for the umpteenth time and was propping myself up with the open car door to marvel at what a badass drunk driver I was when a bolt of knowing struck me. It shot from the starry sky, through my bones, straight into the earth. It “said” several things at once. Foremost was a warning: This is the last time I can help you. God, not I, had delivered me home safe that night.

At the same time, it called bullshit on the way I was living, who I was being, what I was chasing. It said, essentially: You DO know right from wrong. I’d been living out the dramatic impulses of my mind, whereas god appealed to a quiet knowledge in my heart. Even deeper, like the resonance of a bass note, came god’s reality check: We both know you can do better.

I got sober two weeks later.

Next, I tried so hard in early sobriety. I went to meetings trying to look and sound good. I got a sponsor and worked the steps. I prayed… a little. And things definitely did get better. I began to stumble on moments of serenity — though for the most part, I still hurt. Being me still entailed a lot of suffering because I still gave credence to all those head-voices claiming I wasn’t good enough. I still chased the friendship of (sober) cool kids who didn’t include me in stuff. Alone, I felt worthless and abandoned. This went on for… let’s say nine years.

Was I still failing?

Not anymore. Now I had hope. Every day, every week, every month… I got a little bit better. “Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly,” my life transformed. Quickly, I stopped trying to manipulate people (as much) or circumstances (as insistently) and grew more honest. Quickly, I learned to share my honest thoughts and feelings with a sponsor and close friends. Quickly, I adopted the rudiments of service work by helping out my home group and sponsoring women.

Slowly, my primary dwelling place shifted from head to heart. Oh so slowly, I began to sense my own inner knowing. I found my source, my spiritual wellspring, as an energy that flows outward from me whenever I serve as a conduit for god’s love. I learned that seeking opportunities to channel this love is not only the purpose of my life but, inseparably, what grants me a degree of strength and joy beyond anything my mind can manufacture.

I’ve found home within myself. God visits me there. We’re good.

Life is precious. People are cute.

Shit in general seems way less complicated than it used to.

Sometimes, though, I still get lonely. Last night, for instance, I’d anticipated my son staying with me when he wasn’t. I had no energy. I “relapsed” into missing my ex. Melancholy knocked. So I called a friend who’d been struggling but is doing better now and was happy with him for the good turns his life’s taken. And when another friend stopped by to pick up a Gopro he’d loaned me, I asked him in so we could visit.

These contacts couldn’t alleviate my loneliness, but they let me make friends with it. Turning in for the night, I told myself: “We’re just tired from that insanely tough climb a few days ago. And we’re impatient to find a partner. That’s just life. It’s okay.”

My message to you, dear reader, is that wherever you find yourself on this journey called sobriety, so long as you keep working your program and seeking god’s guidance in all your choices, you’re growing. You’re better today than you were last year. Little by little, you will find your wholeness.

I know it can often look as if life’s easier for others. It’s not. Being human is hard work. We alcoholics just effed it up so royally that god gave us Cliff Notes in the form of the Big Book. All the secrets of a good life are housed between its covers.

One day at a time, one habit at a time, one kindness at a time, we move out of the darkness and toward the light. Hold fast to your hope. Keep going. You’re loved beyond your wildest dreams.

I come from a long line of alcoholics, pioneers and midwives and professors who knew they didn’t want to drink as much as they did, yet were sucked down into the bottle time and time again. I’m cut from the same cloth but haven’t had a drink for twenty-two years. What’s up with that?

When I used to dry out between binges I was an insecure, socially phobic, jealous, frightened, depressed woman who would pretend to be whatever might impress you. Anticipating drinks brought me hope. Starting to drink steadied me. Rolling through drinks, I found courage and gusto and release — sweet release! — in the dopamine flooding my neurons. Some day, I’d pull off great feats!

At first, sobriety robbed me of a desperately needed escape. I’ll never forget a certain unremarkable morning in ’95. I’d been dry about six months without a spiritual program. My partner was driving us along a curving freeway ramp while some implacable panic rose higher and higher in my chest with every breath I took and every random object that struck my brittle brain — building, guard rail, pavement, cars.

I thought-screamed, I CAN’T STAND IT!!!!!

But today, I flourish. My brain is happy, and I’m living a life I love. What’s up with that?

Here’s me day before yesterday:

Crater of Mount Baker at dawn

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I’m on the right. This is a photo of a frickin’ miracle. I’ve recently turned 57. I’m standing at 9,800 feet at 5:00 a.m. beside the hissing, venting crater of a live volcano with my best friend wearing frickin’ bikini tops in temperatures close to freezing. We are… the Baker Birthday Bikini Bitches!

I got here through hard work. The work of healing a broken brain and twisted psyche is extensive, yet all compacted down into 12 simple, trite little steps listed in Chapter 5 of AA’s Big Book — steps I dismissed as worthless at my first AA meeting after reading them off the wall in less than a minute.

It takes a good sponsor, one “armed with the facts” about him/herself, to unpack those steps and open up each like one of those expandable sphere toys so that the sponsee is confronted again and again with the challenge of either seeking greater honesty or cycling through their tired lies again.

I’ve worked these steps not once, not twice, but through enough iterations that their perspective has become the lens through which I view everyday life. To express that in detail, I’ve surrendered all illusions that I can drink normally (1); I recognize that alone my thinking is warped (2); I ask god to guide it minute by minute (3); I seek out the selfish distortions in my interpretations of people, places, and things (4); I tell on myself to trusted others, increasingly with humor (5), and pray for the clarity to quit thinking/acting that way (6-7). If I’ve offended, I own it and amend it (8-10), because I want to meet my god without defenses every day (11) so I can be useful to others (12). That is how I effing live.

How does that get me up the mountain?

There is something. You can call it whatever you like. Currents of energy course through and radiate from everything that lives, and their frequency is affected by each loving or fear-based thought that every one of us generates from one moment to the next. And those currents converge in some nexus of intelligence that loves far beyond our brains’ comprehension and yet is not beyond us, because we are of it. We are a shard, a fragment, a ray of that immensity, and when we ask, it resonates within us, filling what was empty, healing what was hurt.

The kicker is that condition: when we ask.

And we can’t ask just once — like for a piece of gum or something: “Hey, god, this deal sucks, can ya help me out?” Nope. We ask in layer upon layer upon layer. We ask every frickin’ day, in everything we do: “Help me. Be with me. Move my heart and mind toward goodness and beauty.”

And if we do this long enough and sincerely enough, do you know what happens?

CRAZY SHIT.

So many miracles, I don’t know where to begin! Living by the 12 Steps has brought me to a place where I can be my authentic self among worthy others and trust that I am loved.

Daily honesty with god has given me the mindset to become the person I longed to be — to quit smoking, stop over-eating, cease tolerating abuse; to pay the bills and provide for my kid; to really get it that, if something’s going to improve in my life, I have to try for it (a lot easier when you know god’s there to catch you).

Humility has let me accept that if I want to do something immense, like climbing a mountain or writing a memoir or opening a business, I have to start with measly, pathetic little steps… and keep at it.

And beautiful things unfold as a result. Here we are again from a different angle.

Bikini bitches! (click to enlarge)

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Are we in good shape? Sure. But this photo doesn’t show what’s really there: the strength of LOVE. The love between my friend and me lets us speak of anything — anything! — and frees us to laugh about much of it. I know of my friend’s horrific childhood and years of cocaine addiction. She knows the compulsions that warped my past.

There’s also the love of fellow alcoholics who taught us our mountaineering skills, much as sponsors taught us life skills. When we started up at midnight from our base camp, where our third friend stayed behind with her ankle sprained from a creek crossing, we felt small and scared. The hulking glow of Baker’s ancient glaciers loomed a mile above us in the moonlight. It was just we two roped together to arrest falls as we wended our way by headlamps among yawning, deep crevasses, sometimes cussing like sailors.

We did it. We’re sober miracles. And, for each of us who gets there, for every alcoholic who reaches that precious freedom granted by true sobriety, it all began with that first little word of AA’s First Step, the first time it really sank in: We.

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A few more images (click to enlarge)…

Mount Baker from a distance – second most heavily glaciated in the contiguous 48 states

When you’re on vacation, you know what’s a great idea? Going to AA meetings.

Traveling for work, what keeps you grounded? You guessed it, meetings.

Visiting out-of-town relatives? Are you fucking kidding me? MEETINGS!

I’ve attended AA meetings in Greece, Hawaii, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Spokane, Boston, and New York — at least, that’s all I can recall offhand. Especially when I’m traveling alone, the rooms feel like home. In Athens, Greece, for instance, I walked more than 2 miles from my hotel (which featured a lush tropical bar) to track down a small AA symbol partially obscured by ivy on tower centuries old. Climbing to the room, I was met with posters of Bill and Bob on the walls along with the 12 Steps & Traditions, in English.

That meeting united accents from all over the globe, but the first share came from a weeping American woman who feared for her job. A flight attendant, she’d screwed up the landing cross-check and inflated a slide, delaying the next flight by half a day. ‘Coincidentally,’ though, she’d been my flight attendant. Chucking the cross-talk taboo, I spoke up, recounting for her everything she’d done right on that flight, along with all the extra demands placed on her as the only attendant fluent in Greek. Tears streamed down her face as she listened, and she was certainly not alone in that.

Just three months sober at the time, I’d not planned on sharing. But the that experience — along with the fellowship afterward at an outdoor cafe where the whole rollicking group wrote on my tourist map about where to go and what to see — cemented the meeting policy that has served me to this day: JUST GO.

At 22 years sober, I still go to meetings out-of-town. Yes, I have an awesome life. The craving to drink is long gone. Parts of me blighted by alcoholism have blossomed. Scars from childhood are healing in the sunlight of the spirit. Whereas it used to suck abysmally to be me without alcohol, drugs, and/or the highs of obsessive infatuation, today my mind and heart feel like a comfy, cheerful place to hang out.

Hokey as it may sound, I’m just back from a travel adventure commonly known as a college reunion. Thirty-five years ago, I was lucky enough to have parents who sent me to a “seven sisters” college (Vassar). This past weekend, I was a lucky enough to get a reunion “scholarship” to revisit the place. So off I flew to New York.

The vast contrast between who I was at 21 and who I am today struck me every minute I was there. For example, only a few of my friends showed up, which in the past would have posed a disappointment. Today, it meant a chance to get to know classmates I recognized but didn’t know personally, all of whom had aged, of course, but also matured into better selves — without 12-step work! “I get nicer every year,” remarked one of my normie friends, reflecting on the effect of life’s losses and tears, “and I hold back less.”

I re-explored the grand library’s “secret” spiral staircases, subterranean stacks, and lofty tower with a new friend, giggling and chatting about the fertility ordeals by which we got our kids. With another, shopping near campus, I shared the shock and pain of lost relationships. I’d somehow imagined that everyone else from Vassar was living ideal, tragedy-free lives, but was reminded yet again that being human is painful for all of us.

To me, as an alcoholic, growth is a huge deal: trusting others with the truth of my inner experiences was, in my youth, a risk beyond my limits. Trapped by self-conscious awkwardness and social fears, I needed alcohol to cut me loose. For 14 years, daily drinking halted my emotional growth so thoroughly that by age 34, when I finally hit bottom, I was still literally going to keggers at which I tried to act cool.

For me, the difference between the selfishly miserable person I was for so long and the outgoing, happy person I am today comes down to one factor: god.

It’s my awareness of a god that loves me no matter what, the one I found in AA, that grants me the courage I need to reach out to others — courage that has emboldened me to live large and build a beautiful life.

An Alcoholics Anonymous meeting was posted in the reunion schedule for Saturday afternoon, competing with four tempting lectures (on Vassar’s art, theater costumes, diversity tactics, and… Trump). I skipped ’em. I went to the meeting. I’d set an alarm on my phone. I left all my friends. There was no question in my mind as I crossed campus to find it.

Sure, booze — free booze, mind you — was flowing everywhere, and friends unaware I’m sober were constantly offering to grab me drinks. But that’s not why I went. Saying “no thanks” is as easy for me as turning down arsenic. Rather, I went to the AA meeting because that’s where my god shows up.

The fancy parlor held five of us – two newcomers, two with 20-plus years, and an Al-Anon with two. Hearing the shares of the newcomers — their feelings as if they were walking a balance beam of their commitment to life and integrity while their old tactics of escape clamored for them to hop down, and their amazement that they were actually doing it, miraculously passing up drinks — reminded me that I am still and will always be missing the crucial piece that god provides. My wholeness is granted to me one day at a time by a power outside me.

Normie friends, for the most part, can’t understand this. One chalked up my lengthy sobriety to “grit and determination.” The fact is, I tried “grit and determination” about 1,753 times, and it never worked! But god has. That connection is all I jones for these days, and I know I can always find it at meetings, no matter where I roam.